提出可扩展的SAGE框架,实现大模型稀疏自编码器的真值评估。
SAGE: Scalable Ground Truth Evaluations for Large Sparse Autoencoders
- 基于残差流重构新方法,无需为每个任务位置单独训练SAE
- 在Pythia70M等模型上自动识别任务激活点并生成真值特征
- 支持大规模模型与新任务评估,推动可泛化的可解释性研究
可解释性研究中的关键挑战是如何将模型激活分解为有意义的特征。稀疏自编码器(SAEs)为此提供了有前景的解决方案。然而,评估SAE质量的核心难题在于缺乏可用于评估的真值特征。现有评估方法面临显著权衡:要么使用带预设真值特征的玩具模型或代理,要么依赖对真实任务电路的大量先验知识。前者限制了评估结果的泛化性,后者则限制了可评估模型和任务的范围。我们提出SAGE:可扩展的自编码器真值评估框架,能够对大规模先进SAE及模型进行真值评估。我们证明该方法可自动识别任务特定激活点,并在这些点上计算真值特征。相比之前方法,通过引入新颖的重建方式,大幅降低训练开销,使残差流SAE可应用于子层激活,无需为每个任务激活位置单独训练SAE。随后我们在Pythia70M、GPT-2 Small和Gemma-2-2的新任务上验证了框架的可扩展性。SAGE因此为可解释性研究中通用、大规模的SAE评估开辟了道路。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
A key challenge in interpretability is to decompose model activations into meaningful features. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for this task. However, a central problem in evaluating the quality of SAEs is the absence of ground truth features to serve as an evaluation gold standard. Current evaluation methods for SAEs are therefore confronted with a significant trade-off: SAEs can either leverage toy models or other proxies with predefined ground truth features; or they use extensive prior knowledge of realistic task circuits. The former limits the generalizability of the evaluation results, while the latter limits the range of models and tasks that can be used for evaluations. We introduce SAGE: Scalable Autoencoder Ground-truth Evaluation, a ground truth evaluation framework for SAEs that scales to large state-of-the-art SAEs and models. We demonstrate that our method can automatically identify task-specific activations and compute ground truth features at these points. Compared to previous methods we reduce the training overhead by introducing a novel reconstruction method that allows to apply residual stream SAEs to sublayer activations. This eliminates the need for SAEs trained on every task-specific activation location. Then we validate the scalability of our framework, by evaluating SAEs on novel tasks on Pythia70M, GPT-2 Small, and Gemma-2-2. Our framework therefore paves the way for generalizable, large-scale evaluations of SAEs in interpretability research.
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